Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

Aldous Huxley
Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.

Aldous Huxley
People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.

Aldous Huxley
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.

Aldous Huxley
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.

Aldous Huxley
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Aldous Huxley
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

Aldous Huxley
Fertilize and bokanovskify — in other words, multiply by seventy-two — and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty two batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.

Aldous Huxley
The demon of calculation possesses the mind.

Aldous Huxley
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

Aldous Huxley
If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?

Aldous Huxley
Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Aldous Huxley
Science sometimes builds new bridges between universes of discourse and experience hitherto regarded as separate and heterogeneous. But science also breaks down old bridges and opens gulfs between universes that, traditionally, had been connected.

Aldous Huxley
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Aldous Huxley
"Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster," said the Director, who was tired of talking.

Aldous Huxley
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.... it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Aldous Huxley
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Aldous Huxley
Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

Aldous Huxley
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Aldous Huxley
Ram it in, ram it in! Children's heads are hollow. Ram it in, ram it in! Still there's more to follow.

Aldous Huxley
For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

Aldous Huxley
Too much theorizing, as we all know, is fatal to the soul.

Aldous Huxley
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

Aldous Huxley
In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Aldous Huxley
It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

Aldous Huxley
But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

Aldous Huxley
The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Aldous Huxley
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Aldous Huxley
All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made.

Aldous Huxley
Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

Aldous Huxley